(8)

This seems like a good time to mention so-called ‘street-lit,’ the usually self-published books available on your finer 125th St card tables, because so much of it seems intent on embodying this exact paradigm. While I’m down with anything that encourages kids to read, or allows folks to get paid for writing, it seems to me that the bulk of these books are – from a literary perspective – garbage. If we indulge the increasingly tired ‘hip hop vs. rap’ polarity, these books would be rap: chocked with brand names, populated by blinged out thugs and and video-vixen-style women, and plagued by shallow characters and bad storytelling.